What I'm Reading...
They not banning phones but they are banning books. M E S S A G E!!!
I share a birthday with Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison. A dazzling trio.
When I found this out, I laughed out loud. Imagine being a writer and realizing you will never even be the best writer with your birthday.
A perfect tragedy.
Alas, we are a trio and I know my role. In any good trio or band or team, players have to know their role. I've read and studied their roles since the first time I learned of their names. Early on not understanding half of what they were speaking of or writing about. But my bandmates are timeless Aquarians and anything written by them can be revisited, reread and renewed for generations to come.
I am reading "The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations," by Toni Morrison.
When this collection was published in 2019, I read it in a fever, from front to back. Now I am re-reading the writings out of order, letting the regime like ‘developments’ guide which essay I read next. I recommend one essay per Sunday morning, with coffee or tea or whatever the morning vice. This work will inform you for tomorrow, equip you with the right wisdom to navigate uncharted times and help make sense of the evil that is now showing its face.
The titles, written in the past have found their way to our present.
“Racism and Fascism”
“Wartalk”
“The Price of Wealth, The Cost of Care”
“Women, Race and Memory”
Etc. Etc. Etc.
Morrison starts the book with a singular essay, titled “Peril.”
It begins: “Authoritarian regimes, dictators, despots are often, but not always, fools. But none is foolish to give perception, dissident writers free range to publish their judgements or follow their creative instincts. They know they do so at their own peril. They are not stupid enough to abandon control (overt or insidious) over media. Their methods include surveillance, censorship, arrest, even slaughter of those writers informing and disturbing the public. Writers who are unsettling, calling into question, taking another, deeper look. Writers, journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights — can disturb the social oppressions that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace, and they stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to.”
Aquarians are known for being clairvoyant. To see past the now and reality as a whole. Intuition, foresight and seeing the big picture are also described attributes. In this collection, Morrison riffs effortlessly on the complexities of society, politics and art (and creating art) in a world hell bent on suffocating the voices of truth. She also brilliantly analyzes1 our past and more importantly our future as greed and technology restructures our existence.
Maybe my role in the trio is to tell you to listen to the voices of the other two. Maybe my role is to simply write this note on the off chance that it sparks someone to pick up Lorde2 or Morrison. To read their words. To let fate take it from there.
Who knows, maybe the conclusion of that literary domino effect could, in a future unwritten, be more important and more world changing than all the efforts of the individuals in the trio combined.
For a country on the precipice of massive change, "The Source of Self-Regard,” may be one of the most important documents we have that chronicles how we got here.
Blunt. Powerful. Succinct.
And like the trio.
Dazzling.
Morrison uses references and resources that span centuries and the globe. Uncanny.
“The Selected Works of Audre Lorde,” is a good place to start.